The “I” word

[Belsnickel]

(11-29-2018, 03:12 PM)Sociopathicsteelerfan Wrote: Thank you for the link Bell, I'll certainly give it a look.  As far as impeachment goes, the constant calls for it, some starting the day after the election, have actually made it far more difficult to actually do it.  Mueller may come up with something that would have been agreeably impeachable if the topic hadn't been beaten to death for the last two years.  At this point they're going to need an ironclad smoking gun for it to happen.  The extreme elements of the Democratic party, Waters etc. have really poisoned the well on this subject

Honestly, the well was poisoned before then. While I would agree there has been an uptick since Trump's election, the politicization of the process that really began with the Clinton proceedings poisoned that well, already. Nixon's impeachment would have happened because there was a bipartisan consensus on the need to do it. By making impeachment more partisan and thus political with the Clinton situation it made it so that any attempt at impeachment without solid evidence would seem like partisan hackery.

And this isn't to lay the blame at the feet of the Republicans. While they had a big hand in it, the blame is shared strongly with the Democrats because their defense of Clinton was to make the argument more partisan than just looking at the issue at hand. Maxine Waters, as they discussed in the podcast I linked, was one of those Democrats to call the Clinton attempt a coup.

In the end it boils down to my original opinion: no matter what the historical precedent, our political climate requires much more in the way of objective evidence of criminal activity for impeachment. I know I didn't lay that out explicitly in the OP, but that is what I was saying. Were we blessed with a slate of legislators that the people believed were acting in good faith for the country, then it'd be a different story. But that's not our current government.